Pink Brutus Knits Blog

Zealana Yarns Valla Capelet KAL | Intro

It's June 1st and a brisk 52 degrees here in Indiana. What a joke! On the bright side, it's lovely knitting weather, perfectly coinciding with my Valla Capelet KAL preparations.

I was delighted to get my hands on Zealana Yarns AIR lace last winter and worked up two designs - the first, a cowl that can be worn pulled over the shoulders to a capelet and the other, a tunic. They're sort of "sister" designs in that they feature the same stitches and share similar styles however the capelet can be knit up relatively quickly using only 3 balls of yarn.

Cirilia invited me to join the KAL and I immediately went down the to-do list my personal life is stacking on my shoulders right now and paused, but only for a moment. I can't promise I'll be able to bind-off by the end of the KAL, but I will certainly try!

Zealana Yarns Passport 2015

It's been a couple weeks and I have yarn in hand!!

SO, to begin, I'm using the AIR Lace in shade 04 -- Natural for the KAL. Since working up the samples in such bright, saturated hues I wanted to see for myself the depth of color and texture in a lovely neutral tone. I will be swatching today, then cutting to the chase and casting on!

I prefer the long tail cast-on method and use it almost exclusively. When casting on a large number of stitches, the long tail method may seem daunting for two reasons -- firstly and the most obvious, if I run out of tail, I'll have to rip and start again which is just frustrating with 200+ stitches; secondly, if I have far too much tail left over and have to cut it, I'll just cringe at the waste! For my piece, I'm casting on 12 sts / 4" length of tail yarn on size US4 needles. This means I need a length of yarn a third of my final stitch count (plus about 5" for the tail) -- I need 93" of yarn total to complete my cast-on.

It's also important to be extremely careful not to twist the stitches on a project like this before joining for rounds. Using a fine yarn paired with the large number of stitches can make it more difficult to see when there's a twist along the cable. To avoid this problem, I use the longest cable I can while still working comfortably. In this case, I'm using a 21" cable with my interchangeable points making the needle closer to a 32" circ. However, the pattern calls for 24" needles so that changing needles after decreasing is avoided. This is all up to personal preference.